You’re an astronaut bound for Mars, a dusty and barren planet with an atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide that on a good day is 139,808,518 miles from Earth, a stone’s throw from a galactic perspective but a nine-month trip for you and your crewmates.

As your spacecraft—perhaps it’s NASA’s Orion crew vehicle or SpaceX’s Big Falcon Rocket or a variation of Boeing’s Starliner—hurtles away from home, communication becomes increasingly delayed. At first the lag is only a few seconds, but as the weeks go by, real-time communication becomes impossible. Depending on the relative position of Earth and Mars as they orbit around the Sun, the delay by the time you reach Mars could exceed 20 minutes, creating 40 minutes of silence in a two-way conversation. Incredibly, the 3 to 22 minutes it takes—again, depending on the positions of the planets—for information to travel from Earth to Mars at the speed of light is nothing compared to the four days it took a message to travel from New York City to Washington, D.C. at the speed of stagecoach in 1800.

Although our communications capabilities have evolved greatly in the last 200 years, it’s operationally and psychologically critical to continue searching for new ways to achieve reliable communication between explorers and our pale blue dot. A study conducted by NASA on the International Space Station in 2014, for example, found that even a 50-second delay frustrated crewmembers and that real-time communication improves both performance and morale.

Yet, the time delay isn't the only communications challenge you’ll face on the journey to Mars. Another is the quality of the signal you receive. The radio waves that currently carry wireless transmissions—including your WiFi signal—aren’t very data efficient and lose strength over distance due to their longer wavelengths. That’s why NASA is investing heavily in laser communications research. Lasers operate on shorter wavelengths, allowing for more data per wave and superior signal fidelity. They also require smaller transmitters and receivers and use less energy than radio technologies. One day, these laser communications systems could theoretically enable HD video to be streamed between Earth and Mars.

NASA’s Laser Communication Relay Demonstration, which will launch sometime in 2019, will serve as an important proof-of-concept of this technology. Don Cornwell, the director of advanced communication and navigation for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation Program, notes that much of the equipment required for these laser systems is the same fiber optic technology that forms the backbone of the internet. “A lot of components out-of-the-box work well,” says Cornwell.

One of the challenges with using lasers, however, is line of sight. Because of their narrow beam, lasers not only require more precise targeting and stabilization, but a more direct line of sight as well. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but once every two years Mars drifts behind the Sun in what’s called a solar conjunction, creating a few weeks of communications blackout. According to Cornwell, NASA has started talking about building relay satellites at 90 degree angles to the Sun to bounce signals around it during these periods.

NASA is already deploying relay satellites that can transmit data from Mars to Earth. The agency’s Mars Cube One demonstration, which launched in May as part of the InSight mission that’s expected to reach Mars in November, will use two small cube satellites with onboard communications and navigation capabilities to relay information from the InSight lander back to Earth. Although these cubesats will still use radio waves, they will show that low-cost relay satellites can play a valuable role in multiplanetary communications and lay the foundation for surface to surface communication and navigation on Mars. Navigation is particularly salient, says Cornwell, who points out that establishing a GPS navigation network will be important to making sure crewed vehicles land within distance of future in-situ resource harvesting operations, which NASA and SpaceX see as key to supplying the fuel crews will need to return to Earth.

NASA is also working closely with its international counterparts and the private sector to establish interoperability standards for space communication. According to Cornwell, the agency attends biannual meetings to work on these standards with other space agencies like the European Space Agency and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, and even held a workshop last summer at NASA headquarters with 110 representatives from 36 telecommunications and space companies, including Google, AT&T, Facebook and SpaceX. Such meetings aren't just for public relations. Interoperability has been a historical problem in every tech-enabled industry, from telecom to enterprise software. If you have an Xbox, you can't play someone on a PlayStation. If you have an iPhone, you can't airdrop files to someone with an Android. While consumers don't typically need this level of interoperability, standards are necessary if you want to be able to call a landline from your cellphone or transfer your patient data from one hospital to another.

The vision for Martian communications that emerges from these examples is one that imagines networks of fully interoperable laser-beaming satellites spread across millions of miles—a marked departure from the fragmented and fixed fiber networks that we’re accustomed to on Earth. Given the current initiatives underway at NASA, communications infrastructure on Mars may ultimately involve fewer fixed assets, have a smaller footprint and be more efficient than communications on Earth. Mars is a greenfield, a blank slate. Just as cities like Singapore and Dubai learned from the infrastructure missteps of the West, we have an opportunity to lay a foundation on Mars that will support long-term, even permanent settlements that may eventually be the envy of Earth.